Seaming is Believing

Seaming a sweater is a process.  Sometimes it is a journey.  Always, for me,  it is a time of hopefulness.  It is a time when the knitting is done and I start to wonder what all my knitting effort is going to turn into.  As I've gotten to be a more experienced knitter, I go into the finishing process with more comfort that "everything will turn out all right".  My technical finsihing skills are much more polished now than they were over 10 years ago when I first learned to knit.  I understand how to block a piece of knitted fabric. I understand what a selvedge is and how to use it. My mattress seams are lovely and even.  I understand the process of setting in a sleeve and have a good understanding of how to minimize bulk in the seams.  I can weave in ends so that they are hard to see.  But there are still always the little things that get you worried.  Things, that even if all the technical things in the world have been done correctly, might still result in a not-quite-successful sweater... what if I didn't measure myself properly?  What if my gauge was a little off? What if I should have made the sleeves just a little bit longer? 

And there in lies the hopefulness.  The hope that when all the effort it complete, the garment will be one that looks as I envisioned it and makes me look like the walking goddess of the needles that I want to think myself to be.

If anything is a prayer to the knitting gods, it is careful finishing.   It is a detail oriented thing.  Pieces of a sweater that have to fit together must have edges that fit together.  Blocking must be done so as to maximize the shape of similar curves.  Then those edges have to be brought together, and brought together in the right order.  To do this, I have to clear my mind, clear some time and focus on joining edge stitches together neatly.  Almost as if there is no seam at all.  This process takes time.  Often I find that the finishing takes more time than the knitting of one of the major pieces.  Just to get where I have with Lotus is probably 5 or so hours of effort -- and I still have not yet tackled setting in the sleeves.  Something I consider to be the most challenging part of the finishing to make look neat. 

For this project, though, I will probably delay setting in the sleeves until after I work the crochet border.  I have decided that that border will be worked in the round and it goes around the entire outer edge of the body of the sweater.  The sleeves will likely just make that process harder, so I will sew them in after the edging is complete.

The finishing of this sweater has had another purpose for me as well.  It has helped me get ready for another journey.  Last week, we were doing some decision making on our vacation for the summer.  We were just about to sign the agreement for the most perfect beach house on the northern shores of Kauai, when things started to happen... vacation took longer to approve than expected, family health issues came up.  Suddenly that beach house that I could visualize lounging in and in front of started to feel as if it were farther away. It occurred to me that I had promised myself that Lotus would be ready for that vacation.  In a way that only a knitter can, I decided that lack of garment completion was the issue.  Perhaps the fact that I was not focused on getting the sweater finished was causing our vacation plans to get unfocused as well.   I decided to begin to dedicate more time to finishing Lotus.  After the shoulder and side seams were in place, the vacation got approved, the family health issues resolved enough for us to be able to feel okay about leaving the mainland for 2 weeks.  And we signed the paperwork on the beach house.

Seaming is believing, my friends.  Seaming is believing.